Is it wise to break convention - the wildcard convention

I have been a long term user of 7Za.exe, the command line version 7-ZIP, and recently have been using it to back up my Subversion repositories. Like many that use this kind of programs, one is too trusting to believe that it will honor the same convention as other CMD commands to archive all files, with the exception of those files in used, when one issues a command line like this:

7za a -tzip Test.zip MyWork\*.* -r

To many long time users of Windows Dos Prompt, this is the standard way to instruct a program to process all files; the Del, Attrib, Copy, XCopy, Cacls, Dir, RoboCopy, and Rar all conform to this convention and hence one naturally assumes that 7Za.exe would naturally honor this.

Not so, and I learned this the painful way. According to the help file of 7-Zip:

7-Zip doesn't follow the archaic rule by which *.* means any file. 7-Zip treats *.* as matching the name of any file that has an extension. To process all files, you must use a * wildcard.

Well, while it is admirable for someone to make a partial stand of this 'archaic rule', it is dangerous to use the same syntax and then silently producing a different result set. It is like switching the active and neutral wires in the electric wiring just because someone took exception to the color coding convention of the wire.

The fact remains that before 7-zip comes along to Windows, that convention has already been established and entrenched, way before it was mistakenly claimed by 7-Zip as introduced in Win 95. There are millions of users accustomed to this convention whether it is logical or illogical; this has become their second nature; it is like arguing whether it is logical or illogical to drive on the left hand side or right hand side of the road; a lone group of dissenting drivers taking a stand can not only play havoc on our roads but producing fatalities.

A convention has been established and people driving on public road has therefore to conform to it, like it or not. In US, all vehicles driving in a mine drives on the opposite side to those on the public road. The change of convention was explicitly stated, for reason sound in mining operations, and drivers are deliberately made to go through a change over section.

7Za however, did not do such a thing. It took *.* to mean 'all files must have extensions' in contrast to the Windows convention which means 'all files with or without extensions', which is understood by millions or trillions.

It is not a dispute of 7Za for being correct. It is raised here for its dangerous and irresponsible practice of flaunting a convention while using the same syntax.

For example,

7za a -tzip Test.zip MyWork\*.* -r

Should pick up all files in a Subversion repository regardless if the files contain extensions of not; many Subversion files do not have extensions. Rar with this command picks up all files honoring the Windows convention:

Rar a -r Test.rar MyWork\*.*

This is not only wise but also responsible realizing the consequence for failing to and taking a stand only brings at best hollow victory and wrath from users at the worst; such is the case with 7za now.

According to the Windows API and treatments of wildcard characters, there is no way to specify collecting files only with extensions. For example using Dir as an example:

Dir *.* /s /b

and

Dir * /s /b

produce the same result: a list of files with or without extensions. The second form is 7Za's way of specifying any file with or without extension but accepting the first form and producing a totally different result set.

Dir *. /s /b

produces a list of file without extensions. But there is no wildcard syntax to say 'file only with extension'.

As a result of 7-ZIP hollow stand against a convention entrenched in more users of Windows than 7za, it has successfully dislodged people's trust on this program. Archiver should behave much like a copy/xcopy commands; changing the operation with the same syntax is extremely dangerous and developer should not toy with this kind ideological stand in an important tool.

My ill-placed trust on 7za has caused me losing the collection of my Subversion repositories. It is an expensive loss and 7Za's ideological stand against an illogical convention is equally illogical resulting in real loss; what is 7-ZIP hoping to achieve? It has hardly won any friend!

The result is a total distrust of this tool. While I can use Subversion's command to ascertain the integrity of the restored repository, other archives produced by 7Za lack such detection and hence there remains an unknown number of imperfect archives.

I don't discourage 7za to take this kind of admirable stand but it should be selected by users. The default should always follow the convention of the OS in which it is deployed into. 7Za has already established this kind of overriding switches/options and its admirable attempt to correct the convention should only be selected when user makes the choice.

If that is a Unix convention, then either build 7Za to be a Posix conforming program that runs in Windows' Posix subsystem, in which case 7Za can even use case-sensitive file names or have a switch to turn on Unix convention.

This should be a real-life example of the danger of developers failing to conform to entrenched convention, no matter how 'archaic' or illogical that is. The first occupancy rule applies here!

For me, 7Za is now being banished to the recycled-bin as it is too dangerous to use tools that do not conform to convention. It will not earn my recommendation for sure.

Why does software suck - WSJ's latest format

While WSJ's latest update of its web pages are a welcome sign, it adds one very damn annoying feature when showing the indices and the graph as shown here:

This represents the worse design I have ever seen, namely:

• There is no obvious UI clue of which index that graph represents. If you peer hard enough you might see the first index is of different colour to the rest and that indicates the index that graph represents. What's wrong with a dot or a symbol next to it.
• If you want to see the graph of another index, you have to hover the mouse over the index. If you are using a mouse that is fine but if you are using a Tablet PC, it is a pain in the neck as that often brings up Market Data Center. A terrible piece of design.

Using Com Aggregation to help Web Services

Some times ago, I was consulting for a project for a friend that tried to use the SOA approach to expose functionality to the client using Web Services. The functionality is currently implemented as a bunch of .Net components that uses a COM connector component, provided by the vendor of their remote system; pretty much like Microsoft Dynamic AX connector and SAP connector.

Instead of having these components deployed to the desktop, they wanted to place them on a IIS and exposing them as ASMX web services. Things worked fine but performance sucked.

They approach the vendor for help and was told to redevelop the entire stuff using the vendor preferred Web Services. Sounds familiar? That meant tossing out years of work.

So I had a look it and recognise that it was the classic problem of Apartment mismatch with the Service component living in MTA while that STA connector is hosted in a STA resulting in serializing all calls to the STA. I therefore recommended them to follow my recipe for constructing multiple-STA servers.

In a haste, I suggested them to incorporate the interop assembly for the aggregator as well as that of the aggregatee and to alter their construction logic, assuming their connector is called SXServer and the aggregator is called AggregateSXServer, from

  IServerObject svr = new SXServerLib.SXServerClass();

to

   IServerObject svr =
     (IServerObject) AggregateSXServerLib.AggregateSXServerClass();

This worked like a charm alleviating the performance bottleneck except that I now believe that may be I do not need so much changes. There are a couple of techniques I can investigate.

Using Com Emulation
There is a technique that may offer a possibility of enlisting the aggregator without needing to touch the client code. This is known as Com Emulation technique. This technique allows silent redirection of CLSID_ORIGINAL to CLSID_NEWONE by means of a special registry key in the COM registry called TreatAs.

So it sounds like the right stuff to allow me to redirect coclass creation for CLSID_SXServer to CLSID_AggregateSXServer without requiring the rebuild of the web services components. However, it appears that this technique does not support aggregatable component. Even when creating object for IUnknown, the use of TreatAs returns E_NOINTERFACE. Weird.

Anyway that can be left for another day's challenge.

What is the minimal change required in the .Net solution?
So the next investigation is what is the minimal amount of changes require to the .Net solution. In the past, I recommended the inclusion of the interop assemblies for the aggregator as well as the aggregatee. Do I need all that? I know at a minimum I need the interop assembly of the aggregatee because I need to use those interfaces. Do I need that of the aggregator?

It turns out not if we are happy to replace the use of new operator and replacing that with the Activator call. So instead of

   IServerObject svr = new SXServerLib.SXServerClass();

We can change it to:

  IServerObject svr =
     (IServerObject)Activator.CreateInstance
         ( Type.GetTypeFromCLSID
                   ( new Guid( "6E537ABD-96B0-4BBC-9F1C-00924FBF1FB1" )  )  );

This is change is more than cosmetic as it can:
1) let you switch dynamically by providing that Guid as a string from anywhere: from config file or other means. Kind of home-made COM emulation.
2) It also means that you do not have to include and ship the interop assembly of the aggregator. A big plus!

Hence this is purely code changes and no need to add anything to the project references. Why I didn't think of this in the first place?

Of course when we approached the vendor with our solution, they were less than please because this had ruined their chance of selling their Web Service to my friend; no more upgrade fees, etc.

This kind of attitude is a clear sign of customer-neglect and exploitation. Instead of helping their users to make the best of their product, they were out there to take advantage of their customers ignorance of technology. Shame.

My help, utilising the COM technology and requiring no proprietary materials have, now stopped the exploitation dead in its track allowing my friend to continue with their SOA initiative without incurring great loss of discarding current implementation. This is a good design and provides an invaluable service. Any fool can recommend a rebuild approach as that does not need in-depth understanding of technology and design; recommending rebuild is a no brainer.

Incidentally, there is nothing in SOA definitions that say COM cannot be used to implement a SOA provider. After all the whole premise of SOA is to hide the implementation infrastructure. Requiring someone to up root one's design to chain in a vendor's SOA smacks a total misunderstanding of the SOA design philosophy and explotation. Don't you think so?

Who needs any other spyware?

With one big malware that's the browser, called Chrome, who needs any other one!

The most rewarding experience for a developer

Recently two events happened that brought home the truth.

A few weeks ago, I read an interview with the noted Software Guru, Donald Knuth, titled "The 'Art' of Being Donald Knuth" in CACM July 2008, Vol. 51, No. 7, page 36-39, in which he said:

If you ask me what makes me most happy, number one would be somebody saying "I learned something from you". Number two would be somebody saying "I used your software."

When I read this, I thought would I be so lucky to experience the 'Number two' item so dear to Donald Knuth, which I wholeheartedly shared?

The second event took place last week. Out of the blue, not surprisingly uncommon, I received a phone call from my telecommunication provider using the guise of checking my account detail and services correctness trying to sell me more services.

On the other end of the line was a very happy lass who was skillful in not getting upset despite my not so unfriendly exchanges and my unwillingness to buy more services.

I gave my reasons to her and one of those was that I once worked for that company. She politely asked me where I worked, meaning the business units. So I obligatorily gave her the details and mentioned in passing that I was one of the original developers of a program called DRIFT.

When she heard that, she was so ecstatic that she drew the attention of her colleagues to listen in wondering what the fuss was all about. She was so glad that she was actually talking to a person who has developed the tool she is using and obviously appreciating it. Otherwise she would use this opportunity to pour out the complaints. I protested that I did not do it alone but part of a team.

As a developer who is fortunate enough to be allowed freedom to develop/architect something that a large corporation used as a mission critical application is one thing but having someone telling me that he or she is using it to do a job is something else.

I have finally experienced the same experience that matters so greatly to Donald Knuth. I can tell you how rewarding it is, the best accolade!

What is so amazing is that this tools was invented way back in the late '80 and early '90 and still in used and still has no peer. It stands the testimony of time with good design. Of course, it has been attended to it since I left the organisation some 10 years ago by a competent team otherwise it would be gone to disrepair denying me the chance to experience this.

It made my day but I still did not buy anything from this lass.

Difference in Word Counts between Microsoft Word and Open Office

Recently, I was alerted to cases where word counts, often used as assignment benchmark, produced by Microsoft Word and Open Office appear to differ when analysing the same document.

How much do they differ or is there trend? To understand this phenomenon, a number of Word documents are used; some have extensive diagrams while another is a pure text produced from a very large document containing diagrams, tables etc.

Here are the results:
There does not appear to be any trend from these data samples and hence more investigations are required.

It is interesting and educator relying on the Word Count may have to be aware of this issue as more and more students are using Open Office.

Feature useable to users as well as Virus writter

I have always maintained this autorun feature is a questionable design feature and asking for trouble and now has been used to attack NASA's space station.

Sure you can get the Anti-Virus to scan it before launching it but why tempt fate.

A convenient feature to a users will be of equally convenient to Virus/Trojan attackers.

Turn it off.